The Existentialist Time-Traveller
16.01.2017
Abhishek Gaur / Shefali Bohra / Aaroolya Rajesh / Krishnan Ghosh / Pallavi Mambillil / Shahrukh Faquih / Nishant Raj / Oshin T.S.R. / Harsh Sanghvi / Suraj Kumar / Suvani Suri / Shiraz Iqbal
Text: Franco “Bifo” Berardi | Image: Bonobo - Cirrus music video
Today’s harshest experiences of scattered and negative dispersal of energy exist side by side with transcendent impressions. For a moment as one looks up at the vault over Grand Central Terminal in New York, as the beams of dusted light pour in through the huge arched windows, one’s perception modifies consciousness, attention is broadened, time is distended - just as, in the density of language, Osip Mandelstam can nearly stop the passing moment; “the stream of golden honey was pouring so slow..”
- Hall et al. (Questions of Perception)
Extract from “Burnt Norton” by T.S. Eliot
— Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence.
— They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free —
Extract from “At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
— and therefore I’m responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes — an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself. — On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown. — Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds. — Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating.
27.01.2017